1. “Diets don’t work!”

Diets work just the fuck fine. Dieters, on the other hand, are usually stupid fuckups.

The first category of stupid fuckup dieter who says shit like “diets don’t work” is the person who’s not actually dieting. You’ve seen these people, maybe even shared a brain with one of ’em. “I’m on a diet; I started using organic pasta in the five pounds of fettuccine alfredo I eat every night.” “I’m on Atkins; I can eat eleventy billion kcal of bacon and pork rinds as long as I don’t have carbs.” “I’m going vegan. Did you know Oreos are vegan?” Brilliant strategy, cupcake; how many calories are you eating, and how many are you burning? “Oh, well, I don’t have time to pay attention to that stuff.” Sure you do, you just don’t want to. You cannot beat thermodynamics with wishful thinking.

The second category of stupid fuckup dieter does in fact diet, and does so successfully. Then, having demonstrated to themselves and the world that thermodynamics works exactly as you’d expect, this person throws physics the fuck away and expects diet magic to prevent them from regaining all their fat when they go back to eating the same shit, in the same quantities, that made them fat in the first place. “I gained all the weight back; diets don’t work!” That diet worked fine… while you were on it. These sorts of people love to prattle on about “sustainable lifestyle changes” as if that’s somehow an alternative to dieting, rather than the obvious and sensible thing to do after dieting.

2. “Bulking is so haaaard!“

These people, rather than making excuses for not putting any meaningful and thoughfully-directed effort into losing fat, are instead making excuses for not putting any &c. into gaining muscle. Or, some times, just any kind of weight at all. I mean, if you want to make sure you’re gaining muscle and very little fat, the food part gets a little fiddly and you have to work really hard in the squat rack — and I don’t mean curling 65 for a zillion sets of ten, either. But the eating part? Holy shitballs, bulking is fun and motherfucking easy at the recreational level. (There are counterexamples. You’re not one of them.)

Assuming you’re doing enough work in the gym (you probably aren’t doing that, either, but that’s another rant), start by drinking a litre of whole milk every day in addition to “eating like omg soooo much“. Use it to mix your protein shakes or something. (What’s that? You’re “bulking” but not drinking protein shakes? I think we’ve found the fucking problem, Sparky.) If that doesn’t do the trick, add another litre of whole milk. Keep going until it starts to work. If you can’t “force down” all that food, it’s a pretty great sign that you’re not lifting hard enough. Run a Smolov squat cycle or something, you’ll discover your appetite. (“I don’t squat though, I think I read somewhere that it’s bad for your knees. Does Smolov work with leg press?” Kill yourself. Also, I think we found the fucking problem.)

3. “I can’t eat healthy, I don’t have time to cook”

Bullshit. It takes maybe fifteen minutes to prepare a batch of meat slop if you dice the cabbage (or use a food processor) instead of shredding it by hand. Then you let it simmer for a while, during which you can perform all of the incredibly important tasks you’re pretending to have on your plate. Or you can do what you actually want to do “instead of” cooking, like fapping to internet porn or watching CSI: Miami or some shit like that, as long as you take a minute every half hour or so to dig around in the pot with a wooden spoon and make sure the meat slop’s not carbonizing on the bottom of the pot. There you go, roughly half an hour of aggregate effort and you have eight or ten meals. Pack that shit in Pyrex and do it again in a couple of days.

“But eating the same thing over and over is boring!” Fuck you. Meal time is not a trip to Disneyland; it’s primarily about getting nutrition into your body, not entertaining you. Do you insist that every trip to the gas station be a fun and novel experience? No you don’t, because you’re not four years old. Food is the same way.

——

In unrelated news, it’s christmas vacation season, and I’m planning to finally learn how to snatch properly over the course of my two weeks off. My goal is to lift every day (except the 24th, the 25th, and the 1st, because the gym isn’t open those days), on the following programme:

Do high-bar squats or front squats to a max double, then backoffs, with some chins or pullups after each set

Do presses or push presses to a max double, then backoffs, with some chins or pullups after each set

Today I started with overhead squats, but I think that was a mistake. I put the bar overhead for OHSQs by snatching it, and I think doing even three or four terrible, awful, no-good power snatches at the start of my workout poisons my real snatch form just a little. My technique on snatches is fucking terrible, and I’m gonna try to accumulate 400 or so good reps over the course of my vacation time. I would be surprised, but not shocked, if I come back to this blog on January 5th and giddily announce that I’ve snatched bodyweight. I’m sitting around at about 165 (down 20 from March; fuck you again, “diets don’t work” guy), and my best power snatch is 145 — more of a muscle snatch, really, I probably dipped about an inch under that bar. I’m clearly strong enough to snatch 165, I just don’t have the skill or the mindset to do it. Yet.

Running a kcal deficit is pretty much a necessary but not sufficient condition for fat loss. I can imagine situations where it’s not sufficient — maybe you’re eating too little protein and too many carbs, and burning muscle by deamination because your liver doesn’t want anything to do with breaking down triglycerides — but if you’re not being stupid you will lose fat on a deficit. I can also imagine situations where you could lose fat on a caloric surplus — basically Smolov-like loading plus the kind of P-ratio that makes it unlikely that you were fat in the first place — but outside of truly elite athletes I don’t see that as anything other than a fairy tale.